Maeve freezes.
Down in the ditch is an elk. What’s left of an elk—ribs spread like fingers, the snow around it stained dark. Most of the meat ravaged away.
Most of it.
Her throat closes. This is no dream.
It’s a cache. The bear’s cache, what it’s been eating. Maeve feels the burn of something watching her and slowly raises her head. There’s the wind, vague and high above her, but in the woods nothing moves. If it’s out there, it is stalking her. Silent.
All she knows is the bear from her dreams, the sound of it, its dark eyes. A threat bounding at the window. An image. A blur.
This is different, visceral. Just an animal, it will eat whatever it finds to stay alive.
It’s a moment before she can bear to look down again. A tight fear coming through her body: the arc of the elk’s antlers, the strange angle of its head, a ridge of exposed spine. A bull, a giant. Pelt peeled back, or torn away.
She blinks. There’s something else down there, half hidden behind the mess. Some other kill? Something else the bear has dragged in, dark against the darkened snow. She moves cautiously to one side, eyes darting to scan the trees for any movement. A spray of black fur is wedged beneath the elk’s hind leg. Odd-looking and damp.
Maeve stiffens. She already knows what’s hidden there. Her head lightens, spins. For the space of a breath, she’s nine years old again, her mother’s hand at her back, nudging her forward, forcing her to look at what’s caught in the fence. Forcing her to face it.
The dark ridge of fur is a fur-trimmed hood.
Sadie.
Maeve’s stomach turns. It’s Sadie, or what’s left of her, tucked into the back end of the elk. Her slight frame in the snow the size of a child. The girl’s hood drawn tight. Head thrown back.
Sadie’s legs look bent and mechanical, broken where her body has been dragged, and Maeve thinks of Anna’s frozen limbs pulsing stiffly under Dan’s weight as he tried to revive her.
Sadie’s face oddly torn at the temple. One eye open, the other eye destroyed.
She steps closer, sliding a little way down the slope. Shaking now. The wound at Sadie’s forehead doesn’t seem right. It’s not the damage of claws or teeth. It looks more like a hole, a funnel blown clear through the back of her head to the front.
A gunshot. She can see the blast of it, the force.
Maeve’s legs buckle and she lurches forward, catching herself. The bear didn’t kill Sadie. It just scavenged her body from the woods.
She pulls up straight, her shoulders smacking against a tree and knocking her off balance; then she is gone, skidding down the little ridge, ice tearing at her hands as she tries to grab hold of something, anything. Her heart racing. She has to hold herself back from just running blind.
Sadie’s body, lying there, flashes into her mind over and over. Her face. Maeve can’t stop the image coming. Her leg, bent and broken, where the bear’s jaws—
She stops, holding her hands to her mouth and rocking. Trying to stay quiet. She can feel herself falling apart.
She has to get away from here. If she goes out the way she came in, there’s the danger of the unstable ledge. If she stays in the woods—
Maeve decides on the ledge. She wants the open lip, or what’s left of it, to be in sight again; she wants to know where she is. She pulls up and keeps moving, the sound of her own sobbing breaking through even as she tries to swallow it down. Choking on it. She traces her own ragged path back to where she first ran into the trees, but it’s farther than she thought. When she finally sees light between the branches ahead, she starts weeping openly.
This time she stays just inside the tree line, where she knows there must be ground beneath her feet. There’s another noise back in the bush, far behind her, and Maeve freezes—someone tracking her through the woods. But when she turns, there’s nothing there. She tells herself it’s the wind coming up, another wave of the storm.
Maybe the bear dragged Sadie’s body from far away. Bears can cover a lot of ground even in a few hours, can’t they? Maybe there’s no one out here but Maeve.
She tries to step more lightly, deliberately. As though that could help. When she hears another sharp crack, she spins and veers out of the woods.
The center is in sight now, although she is far across the clearing—Maeve forces her way through the snow, back to the path she forged on her way out, knowing it will be easier to run where the drifts have already been broken. But where she’s left a trail, the snow is packed down hard. It’s slippery underfoot and she struggles to keep going, faster, faster, struggles not to fall. She’s almost at the building. She’s almost there.
Another crash in the woods behind her and Maeve reels, turning in circles and stumbling backwards now.
She reaches back, grabs the door handle, and cranks it hard—only the door doesn’t budge. It’s locked.
Karo. She spins and bangs on the door with a fist, yelling out, “Karo! Karolina!”
There’s no movement in the lobby. She pounds harder, screaming Karo’s name, then spins again to scan the woods—
Her breath stops. The branches all bleed together, locking up like chain link. Maeve searches among them, panicked. All she can see is Sadie’s blank staring eye, her hood stained and damp around her face. Some little movement catches at the corner of her vision, and she presses herself against the door, banging on it harder. The wind picks up, whipping across the open. Deep in the shadows, a branch cracks, then another. There’s a spray of snow at the tree line.
Maeve stares.
But it’s only a deer. Two of them. Suddenly they turn and bolt into the forest.
Spooked. Just like the elk she saw in the morning.
Maeve herself bolts, running around the other side of the building to the main doors, yelling for Karo.
This time when she grabs the handle, the door swings free, almost sending her reeling. A little piece of kindling is wedged in the hinge to prop it open—the very safeguard she had considered before leaving, but didn’t actually put in place. Did she?
Maeve hammers at the wood to knock it loose, throws herself inside, and pulls the door shut.
“Karo!” She rushes into the room, adrenaline exploding. “Karolina!”
But the lobby is empty. Blankets sit in a heap on the couch where Maeve left Karo; there is nothing of the fire but embers. Maeve has been gone for hours, far longer than either of them expected. She scans the room, then spins to the door and back again. The air inside feels barely warmer than the air outside, although she doubts this can be true.
“Karolina?”
The call echoes off the high ceiling. The cane that Karo asked for in the morning is also missing, neither leaned up against the hearth where Karo was sitting, nor on the floor, nor anywhere.
Maybe she began to feel better after all. Maybe she massaged the cramp out of her feet, maybe she wanted to walk the circulation back into them. But where could she have gone?
Maeve tries again, louder, her voice breaking a little as it peaks. “Karo?”
Outside, twilight is turning to dusk. She can see her breath.
She skirts the room in the graying light, trying not to run, to stay calm—Karo’s office, then back to the front desk, then the dining room and the kitchen beyond. The place is soundless apart from Maeve’s own voice, her echoing footsteps.
“Karo!”
The pitch sharpening, higher and more desperate every time.
In the dining room there are two tables set with clean plates and folded napkins, coffee cups laid out—breakfast prep that was left ready long ago, the night before the avalanche. Caught in shadow, it looks like a tiny island of civilization in the sea of chairs stacked on tables, their angles almost skeletal, grotesque.
She crosses the lobby a second time, pushes the back stairwell door open, and calls up into the tunnel, but there’s no response there either. A cold, shallow dread begins to work its way through Maeve’s body. Karo left the front
door wedged open for her—
But why?
Maeve casts a long look out the rear windows to where she crossed the field only moments ago. She can’t see anything out there now, the darkening landscape hidden by blowing snow.
Is it possible that Karo went outside? The sound of her, her scent, the thing that spooked the deer. Maeve glances toward the hearth, the pile of blankets, the missing cane. She couldn’t have. Not in her condition. Not by herself.
There’s a shudder as a gust strikes hard at the glass.
This wasn’t the plan.
She takes a sharp inhale and pushes it out, tries to pull herself together: Don’t jump to conclusions, Maeve. But Justin’s torn scarf burns in her mind. First Anna and now Sadie dead and half broken in the snow. And Karo . . . gone. Everyone else unaccounted for.
It’s dark now, inside and out. The lobby growing vast around her. She needs to light a lamp. The building itself is so large and has so many rooms, Maeve thinks. Easy to hide in. Her throat tightens.
Stop it, she thinks. You don’t know. You don’t know anything at all.
Outside, the wind dips low, and she shivers. She’s just bending to feed the fire when there’s a creaking from behind her. Maeve pauses, turns around.
No, not behind her, not exactly. Overhead. Again—the ceiling joist trembles. As though something has fallen and hit the floor above. As though someone has misstepped, tripped, dropped something.
Someone.
Karolina. Maeve straightens, listening. Karo. Willing it to be true.
There’s another creak, and then another, more distant. Fainter, farther on. Is it really the ceiling? Or just the walls themselves groaning in the wind?
A hard smack against the windows, and Maeve jumps. The storm moving in fast. The glass shudders again in the dark.
Maeve lights the lamp and carries it to the back window. She can barely see the snow blowing out there, only her own reflection as she draws near, her face, sharp and white, her eyes just dark hollows. She’s waiting to hear the wind swirl around again, pick up its howl. Strong enough, a moment ago, to thunder at the glass. It’s too quiet now. But something catches at her. She turns slowly, trying to focus.
The locked back door Maeve banged at. She watches now as the handle trembles.
Her dream comes back to her in a wave: a door in the basement, the dead bolt grinding in the lock. Outside, the snow is falling in thick, heavy lines. If someone was close enough to turn the door handle, she would be able to see who it was. Wouldn’t she?
For a moment she sees Sadie again out in the snow, her one intact eye, the pupil full and black and frozen. She leans into the window, peering closer.
There’s a crash, and the whole door frame shakes.
Maeve jumps back, the lamp in her hand swinging. She sets it down and grabs the closest thing—an armchair—and shoves it against the door, then pushes another chair against that, irrational now, kicking the logs from the pile to fill the cracks.
Leaving the lamp behind, she rushes across the lobby to the front door and pushes the couch up against it, struggling with its weight. A blockade. The wind; it must be the wind. But Maeve scrabbles at her waist for the can of bear spray and gets under the front desk, breathing hard. She can still hear pounding at the back window.
Sadie lying in the woods, over and over, her body broken.
“Karolina!”
She tilts her head back and screams Karo’s name, but the sound just echoes.
A can of bear spray is not going to help her. She doesn’t even really know how to use it. Karo is not going to help her either. Karo, limping on contorted muscles. If she is there at all. Maeve needs to be able to defend herself.
“Karo!”
She crawls out and skims across the lobby to Karo’s office. The tool bin is in there; there were sharp things, not weapons exactly—but wasn’t there an ice pick? A saw? But she pushes back the lid to find the box in disarray: all that’s left is a single neon vest, a couple of flares, the first-aid kit. The tools are gone.
“What the fuck. What the fuck—”
She’s whispering out loud. What’s happened here? She shoves the two flares and a box of long matches into her coat pocket, then suddenly remembers the freezer. In the deep freeze, in the kitchen—the emergency hatchet on the wall. A hatchet is better than nothing.
She runs back across the lobby in the dark. The space feels wide open now, furniture piled up against the entrances to either side. As she hits the dining room, something grabs at her, catching her foot—a chair leg, the chair toppled from where it had been stacked. Her foot is wrenched out from under her and Maeve goes down hard, taking two more chairs with her. There’s a crack as her head smacks the edge of a table; when she pushes up, the world spins. Jesus, Maeve! She winces at the pain. Why can’t you be more careful? It takes a moment for her head to clear, and she staggers up, listening for the sound of breaking glass from the lobby. She picks up a dining chair and holds it against her body as a shield.
Why. Can’t. You. Be. More. Careful.
There are no windows in the kitchen, the only light a dim glow that follows her in from the main hall. At the freezer door, she fumbles to disengage the latch. The door swings open. Inside, pure black.
Maeve sets her chair against the door to hold it open. It’s still powerfully cold inside the room; she can feel the sudden change in her fingers, her ears, her cheeks, and works faster. She gropes along the wall for the emergency release button and the hatchet, then remembers the matches in her pocket. She draws them out and sparks a light. Her corner of the room warms to life—the emergency button practically at her fingertips.
The ax is there, right where she remembered it. A glorious little shiny blade. She springs it from its holder and slides it deep into her coat pocket.
The flame plays its way along the match’s wooden shaft. Maeve lets her hand drop. She knows Anna is in there, Anna on her shelf. She doesn’t want to see her.
As she turns to the door, her boot kicks something in the dark, and she trips, almost losing her balance. The sound makes her jump, some metal frame ringing out against the concrete floor. Be careful. She tries to kick the thing aside, but it’s heavy; it barely scrapes along the ground when her boot hits it.
That’s not what stops her. As she lurches to keep from falling, something bumps, gently, against her shoulder.
Something else there, a shadow wavering in the dark. Maeve steps back, half tripping again. Her match burns out and she throws it down, fumbles to draw the next one, and strikes it. The new flame sputters to life. Down on the ground is the shelf ladder; that’s what she keeps tripping on. She looks up.
Feet.
Who would have moved Anna’s body, hung it up like this? Maeve raises the hand with the match a little higher. The ankles are rigid. Toes and arches curled tight. Sharp as sickles.
It’s not Anna. It’s Karo.
Hanging by her neck. She’s dead, her eyes frozen wide, and a trickle of dark blood, thick somehow, at her nostril.
Maeve stumbles back, out of the freezer. She can feel her breath coming faster, too fast, and she pitches forward and vomits on the ground. She drops the match and heaves again, leaning on her knees in the dark.
When she goes back out to the lobby, she doesn’t even try to take shelter. The space is vast and open now and she stands in the center of it, alone. The only light comes from the lantern she left lying on the ground by the back door; in the hearth, just a leftover glow. It’s cold.
Maeve sinks to her knees, staring into the emptiness.
She brings a hand up to the pocket over her heart. She can feel the outline of the little photo strip there but doesn’t draw it out. She doesn’t want to see them—no. It’s the opposite: She doesn’t want them to see her. Not like this. The cold of the floor seeps into her bones. Her knees and shins are aching with it.
She doesn’t have to stay here. She can climb higher, where the water has frozen to ice, where there is f
rost like lace trim on the bedspreads, snow lining the inner window frames. Lie down there. Strip off her warm clothes. Go to sleep.
Let this be over.
Is this what Karo went through? With Maeve’s long absence, she weighed the odds and gave in. Maeve bites her lip, fighting tears. Fighting her rage—damn Karo for just leaving her here, leaving her all alone.
She is there on her knees when the wind drops, and in the silence, she hears it again. A sound overhead. First, the same creaking as before. Maeve freezes, perfectly still, listening. For a moment there’s a new and deeper silence. Then, from somewhere far away, bells.
Slight and chiming, like a child’s music box being opened, the mechanical ballerina beginning her slow twirl. Maeve’s head tilts slowly up.
Above her, the crystal beads of the chandelier tremble against each other. Ringing. A cold draft rises from the floor.
There’s a gunshot, and the sound propels Maeve to her feet.
The strike of metal on metal and a cascade of noise, footsteps, or something dropped and bouncing along the floor directly above her. A jangle of glass rings out from the chandelier.
Karo? Maeve thinks automatically. But no. Something cold and heavy plummets inside of her. If not Karo, then—
Another shot rings out and she spins to the window.
A streak of fire surges through the air and hits the snow. It feels as though she cannot breathe at all; there’s only the slightest puff of fine mist from her lips. Her chest hurts.
She struggles to catch up: not a gunshot but a flare, fired from a second-floor window.
She scans the room—a cavern, the entrances blocked off. Only Maeve, alone, at the center of it. At the gallery door, there’s a yawning shadow. A crack, a deep V. The door is unlocked.
Outside, another flare streaks to the ground, and then silence.
Far above her, at the top of the stairs, the sound of footsteps.
“Maeve!”
The ring of his boots against the open stairs. Maeve turns to see Sim coming down from the mezzanine. As soon as he sees her, he starts to run.
Her legs bow. She wants to weep.
The Retreat Page 22
